Archive for the ‘Ocean News’ Category

Hi folks,

We are very pleased to announce a new partnership with a terrific local food organization: yourfarmstand.com. Home Ecology is now their food pick-up site in Shelburne.

Here’s how it works: go to their website, create an account, select which local foods you want, and then select the pick-up site most convenient to you. And if that happens to be Shelburne, then we’ll see you at the store! This is a great way to support participating farmers, bakers, cheesemakers, etc. and at the same time find out what’s available for local foods.

Bon appetit!

Holly, the compost maven

I made this dish for Thanksgiving dinner, substituting almonds for hazelnuts, and it was as good as the picture looks! A friend of mine gave me a half gallon of maple syrup recently so it was great to be able to use some of it here. It was delicious and beyond easy to make.

What did you bring to dinner?

-Holly, Compost Maven

….

This recipe came from Tara Parker-Pope’s NYT Well Blog:

Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds brussels sprouts

1/4 cup olive oil

3/4 teaspoon sea salt

1/4 teaspoon (or 10 grinds) black pepper

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1/2 cup toasted hazelnuts, coarsely chopped (optional)

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. To prepare the brussels sprouts, remove any yellow or brown outer leaves, cut off the stems and cut in half.

3. In a large bowl, toss the brussels sprouts, olive oil, salt and pepper together. Once all of the brussels sprouts are coated in oil, spread them into a 9-by-13-inch (or larger) baking dish or sheet tray to roast. Note: You may want to line your sheet tray with foil for easy cleanup because the caramelizing process leaves a sticky residue.

4. After 15 minutes, stir the brussels sprouts with a spatula or large spoon to even out the browning. After 30 minutes, stir in the maple syrup. (Steps 1 through 4 can be done a day in advance; store covered in the refrigerator. Continue with Steps 5 and 6 right before serving.)

5. Continue to roast the brussels sprouts for about 15 more minutes, or until they are fork tender (about 45 minutes total roasting time).

6. Toss the roasted brussels sprouts with the hazelnuts and devour!

Yield: Serves 6.

“I prefer butter to margarine, because I trust cows more than I trust chemists.”
–Joan Dye Gussow

“Once in a while, when I have an original thought, I look around and realize Joan said it first”

–Michale Pollan

Hi folks,

The local food movement didn’t just materialize. Rather, our collective journey back to what pre-industrial cultures have always known about living in harmony with nature was blazed by lots of people and traditions, including Yankee ingenuity, Victory Gardens, Deep Ecology, A Sand County Almanac, Scott and Helen Nearing, hippie communes, the Shakers, All Creatures Great and Small, Walden, and the Whole Earth Catalog, just to name a few.

Add to this pantheon the work of Joan Gussow, who blazed a path for living in a connected way while in a traditionally disconnected environment. Joan Gussow has been writing about food policy and the relocalization of the food supply since the early 1970’s. In 2001 she wrote This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, just in time for the rest of us to catch up and hop on the local, slow food movement.

Here’s a great little video of Joan:

Joan Gussow Interview from Shelley Rogers on Vimeo.

Happy canning!
Holly Rae Taylor, Compost Maven

Hi folks,

There’s a terrible irony in celebrating 40 years of Earth Days and Green Up Days while the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is creating an enormous environmental disaster.

Taking action:

Green Up Day: Greening Up our local environment is something we can all do.  It just feels good to be able to make a difference.  Saturday, May 1 is Green Up Day.  Stop by Home Ecology to pick up a handful of green bags to fill with trash.  Call 802.881.0276 for more information.

The oil spill: What can we do about the oil spill?  Check out this website for ways that you can help.

Here’s our very own Green Goddess, Shannon Dufour-Martinez, holding up a green bag at Home Ecology.  Read the article in the Shelburne News here.

I grew up in Vermont and we always participated in Green Up Day.  I liked pitching in and making a difference, even on such a small scale in a small town (350 peope!) and in a very small state.  I think that the action-orientation of the day makes me like Green Up Day even more than Earth Day.  Is that wrong?  Which do you like better?

Find Home Ecology on Twitter @home_ecology and join us on Facebook at Home Ecology

Find me on Twitter @compost_maven

Stay tuned for more news about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  We’ll be watching that closely and blogging and tweeting about it.

In good tilth,

-Holly, Compost Maven

Hi folks!

You might as well know right off the bat: I love personal finance guru, Suze Orman.  She’s straightforward, helps empower people, and she’s got a TON of universal wisdom–it just happens to come out in the form of financial advice, which I think is cool.  Last week Suze said, you’ve got to face it to erase it.  Okay, she was talking about helping people get out of deep debt but it relates to environmental degradation, too.  In fact, the way we’ve treated the environment for the past two hundred years is, in my mind, akin to getting into debt and spending WAY beyond our means.

And quite frankly, I’m worried about the oceans.  I know coral reefs have been bleaching and dying since the ’80’s (at the current rate of destruction 70% of coral reefs will be lost within the next 40 years), and believe me back when everyone was shouting about the rainforest (remember the rainforest?) my eco-empassioned college girlfriend made me aware of coral stress on a regular basis.  And now twenty years later things are really heating up.  The first step to erasing it is facing it, so let’s face it…

According to this Huffington Post blog post I just read, there are 9 Ocean Problems.  Turns out there’s more like 11 really big ones if you include shrimping and rising sea levels, which you should.

Problems and solutions in a nutshell:

1. Let’s face it: Overfishing.  Over 70% of fish species are estimated to be depleted.

Let’s erase it:  Overhaul fishing policies.

2. Let’s face it: Irresponsible fish farming.  Poorly managed and unregulated, these operations lead to nutrient and chemical pollution and harmful fish release.

Let’s erase it:  Regulate this practice.

3. Let’s face it:  Ghost farming.  Lost or discarded gear continues to catch fish and marine animals (see the picture above).

Let’s erase it:  Support fishing gear buy-back programs and/or make biodegradable gear.

4. Let’s face it:  Garbage.  Trash in the water chokes, traps, and destroys all manner of marine life from whales to corals.   There’s a bigger-than-Texas trash vortex out there between California and Hawaii and an Atlantic Ocean garbage vortex, too.

Let’s erase it:  Make non-biodegradable packaging illegal.  Collect and recycle the water trash??  Eliminate the concept of waste!

5. Let’s face it:  Acidification.  An increase in atmospheric CO2 has caused the acidity of ocean water to increase by 25% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  Acidity inhibits the uptake of calcium.  That’s a BIG problem for sea animals that need to build their exoskeletons out of calcium carbonate.

Let’s erase it:  Support climate change legislation.  Drive less.  Compost locally.

6. Let’s face it:  Dead zones.  This is where the ocean floor is devoid of life because the water is devoid of oxygen.  Found primarily at the mouths of large rivers polluted with agriculture-derived nutrients, these excess nutrients in turn cause algal blooms which use up all the oxygen.

Let’s erase it:  Manage and regulate large farm operations for their handling of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.

7. Let’s face it:  Mercury pollution.  Mercury is a neurotoxin derived primarily from coal power plants.  It makes its way up the food chain and is expected to increase by 50% in the next 20 years.

Let’s erase it:  I know some of these solutions sound extreme, but seriously: shut down coal power plants.

8. Let’s face it:  Offshore drilling.  I find this so disturbing: seismic waves used to find oil harms sea mammals and disorients whales.  It also pollutes the sea environment with mercury, arsenic, and lead.  Plus it perpetuates all the problems such as ocean warming and acidification associated with fossil fuel combustion.

Let’s erase it:  Support the ending of this practice and support the development of renewable energy sources.

9. Let’s face it:  Shark finning/whaling.  50 to 100 million sharks are killed each year.  It’s a problem all the way down the food chain when top predators, which reproduce more slowly than they’re being killed, are overfished.

Let’s erase it:  Support better and enforced fishing and whaling policies, and protest the sale of shark fin or whale meat.

10. Let’s face it:  Shrimping.  According to ShrimpSuck.org, the #1 selling seafood in the US, isn’t typically overfished but it is associated with insane percentages of bycatches–the unintended catching of other species while fishing for shrimp.

Let’s erase it:  Support changing fishing policies for the shrimping industry.

11. Let’s face it:  Rising sea levels.  Not much to say about this inevitability so just take a look one sinking island.

Let’s erase it:  Do whatever you can to make a difference!  If we act now we can still slow down the effects of global warming.

See ya next time!

Holly Rae Taylor, the Compost Maven.